Fraser McHarg: Some new to me games

Being home alone has not drastically increased my gaming time, in fact the gaming at home has dropped to zero.  On the other hand I have been able to get out to games nights that I usually don’t make it to, so there has been an upswing there.

Here’s a few new to me games from the last week or so.

Vom Kap Bis Kairo (From Cape to Cairo).  Having not read the rules I was not sure what Cape to Cairo meant, it is actually about building a train line from the Cape to Cairo, thus the different terrain cards.  As the rules were being explained I was a little dubious about the game.  It just shows why I don’t trust my opinion of a game when it is based on nothing other than the rules.  A light but interesting game, an interesting auction system where the value of your money becomes lower and lower as the game progresses.  There is no point in having any money left at the end of the game, because victory is awarded to the first person to build eight tracks and money does not count.  That said, you don’t want to run out of money too early because your track building may grind to a halt just before its intended end point. 

If you see a bunch of Adlung-Spiele card games lying around look out for this one, I will be.

Nuclear War.  OK, OK, that’s not really the truth, Nuclear War is not new to me but it was probably the first time I had played in about ten years, so I figure that counts.  One of the players had picked this up in a recent maths trade and wanted to try it out.  It’s random and it has, in fact the aim of the game is, player elimination and it is still a lot of fun after all these years.

The fun is certainly helped by the fact that it is a quick game.  I doubt that our game including rules explanation when more than twenty minutes.  I remembered catch-phrases from old uni days games, e.g. “I can’t pay!” when flipping over a population card, or “Can I cash in a 25?”

I have all three of Nuclear War, Nuclear Escalation and Nuclear Proliferation.  Somebody mentioned that somewhere there is a suggested list or number of Secret and Top Secret cards to cull to make the triple deck more playable.  I must do find that and bring the triple treat game out again.

Eve: Conquest - The first play for all four players.  I think we got to towards the end of year two out of four before we had to pack up because two of the players needed to catch trains to go home.  We had just reached the point where the game was beginning to click and we had an idea of what we wanted to do.  Hopefully we get to play it again soon so we can start the game with more of a plan.  It is certainly not a quick game but I could see the next four player game coming in at around three to four hours.  It will be interesting to see if the end result is worth the investment of time.  At the moment I think so.  The game looks nice graphically, but could have done with some more development from a usability point of view to make the various bits and pieces more user friendly.  Two hours in we still had a bit of confusion about some things.

Automobile - I arrived at Eurogamesfest on Sunday just as this was about to start, so stepped in as the fifth player.  Initially it seems a little convoluted but that feeling clears up as you start to play.  I liked it a lot and it really gears up (to excuse the pun) towards the end.  There was some quite vicious sales techniques being applied at the end of our game and some bewildered looking tycoons with unsold cars still sitting in their factory lots.  A minor quibble about the the three special tokens, two of them are quite difficult to distinguish from others in the game, since the demand tiles have printed numbers on them, the three special action tokens should have had something printed on them or perhaps some clearly distinguishable colours.  I’ll be grabbing a copy of this.

One more column from Down Under then I’ll be Up Over.

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